The Lost Girls of Willowbrook

Sage wakes up in the ward, vaguely remembering being fed green mush the previous day. She looks for Tina but is told not to ask about her. Sage uses the toilet and tries to rinse urine out of her skirt, but the attendant yells at her, saying that clean clothes come when the laundry shows up.

Sage pushes another cart to the pill dispensary and hides her pills again. This time the janitor who opens the dayroom doors isn’t Eddie, but an older man who ignores all the women. Sage crushes her pills and smears them on the floor under a couch. Norma sees this, and Sage hopes she won’t turn her in.

After breakfast, a nurse wheels Tina into the room in a wheelchair. Tina can’t lift her head and there’s blood in her eye. Norma tells Sage that Tina has been given a lobotomy—a pseudo-medical procedure to sever the frontal lobe from the rest of the brain that was in widespread, unscrupulous use in the mid 20th-century. When Sage asks why, Norma shrugs—Tina might have just been lobotomized to teach a new doctor.

In the middle of the night, Norma wakes Sage up and they sneak out of the ward after Norma steals the nurse’s keys. They go down a series of hallways, including the raucous and disturbing isolation hallway. Norma takes Sage to a supply closet and leads her into a hidden room behind a false panel. There’s a dirty mattress and animal droppings on the floor. Norma tells Sage that Cropsey stays there sometimes and adds that when Rosemary went away, Wayne brought Norma to the room instead of Rosemary. Sage realizes that Wayne has been raping Norma and Rosemary. She warns that Norma could pregnant, but Norma says she’s been surgically sterilized—another commonplace procedure inflicted without consent. When Sage tries to convince Norma to stop coming to the room with Wayne and to tell someone what he’s been doing, Norma gets mad, shoves Sage into a shelf, and runs out of the room. Sage hurries after her and considers trying to find a way to escape, but Norma threatens to tell staff that Sage isn’t taking her pills. Sage returns to the ward and goes to bed. She dreams of seeing Rosemary sitting next a tree, but when she brushes aside Rosemary’s hair, the girl is Tina.

At medication distribution, Sage tries to tell Nurse Vic about Wayne’s sexual abuse of the young women on the ward. Nurse Vic dismissively tells her to discuss it with a doctor.

Back in the dayroom, Norma tries to flirt with Wayne, who yells at her and yanks her arm. Eddie returns to mop the dayroom and talks with Wayne. When Sage moves to approach him, he shakes his head, but after Eddie leaves, Wayne brings Sage a note from Eddie telling her to stay in the dayroom after everyone leaves so they can talk. Wayne leaves Sage in the room after gathering the other residents, locking her in. Now worried that Eddie and Wayne are working together, Sage picks up a chair, holding it above her head threateningly when Eddie comes in. He calms her down, looks at her closely, and tells her he believes she’s not Rosemary. She tells him about Wayne and the secret room, Eddie tells her that the staff won’t intervene. Willowbrook insulates itself to protect from media coverage because doctors are doing unethical vaccine research in the experiment wing, where children there are being purposefully infected with hepatitis. Eddie doesn’t know what happened to Rosemary, but Rosemary did tell him that someone was hurting her at night. Eddie agrees to help Sage by finding her stepfather Alan.

Wayne takes Sage back to the ward while Nurse Vic keeps an eye out.

Sage tries to thank Nurse Vic the next day, but Nurse Vic threatens to have her thrown in the pit. Sage waits for Eddie in the dayroom. When the other janitor comes, she’s heartbroken, but holds out hope that Eddie is just off work for the day. She comforts herself with memories of her childhood with her father and Rosemary and fun times with her friends.

Wayne approaches her later in the afternoon to tease her that Eddie wants to talk with her again. Wayne tries to get Sage to sleep with him. When she turns away, he grabs her threateningly. She beats his chest with her fists and gets away, but he chases her around the room until Eddie comes in and tells Wayne to leave her alone, threatening to get Wayne fired.

Eddie tells Sage that he tried to contact Alan, but Alan didn’t answer the phone or the door, so Eddie left a note. She holds out hope that Alan will still intervene, but asks Eddie to go see her friends as well. Then she asks Eddie if all women at Willowbrook are surgically sterilized—if so, she could prove to Baldwin that she’s not Rosemary. Eddie replies that she won’t be allowed to see a doctor unless she’s bleeding badly or near death. When Sage asks him to cut her wrist or give her something sharp to do it herself, Eddie refuses—she’ll only end up in the pit if it looks like she tried to die by suicide.